Incomes in Central Europe: Distributions, patterns and perceptions

Comparative documentation on earnings and household incomes is gathered and analyzed to show recent tendencies in distributional patterns in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. No revolutions, but important shifts mostly maintaining differences between countries have occurred since 1989. Inequality rose in both personal and household incomes, and market patterns seem to have developed at the expense of demographic determination of incomes. Whereas recent income mobility in Poland and Hungary has been caused mostly by education, firm ownership and branch of activity played a more important role in the former Czechoslovakia. Legitimacy of in equality is low in all countries and poverty is increasingly viewed as the state's responsi bility. The bottom of the income distribution is however far larger in Hungary and Poland than in the Czech Republic. Slovakia is also slowly shifting into the former group. Under increasing deprivation, income inequality and its control is likely to become one of the hottest issues.